Affiliation(s)

Fields of Study

Russian and East European literature and film, literary and film theory

About

Herbert Eagle's research and teaching have focused on Russian and East European cinema, film theory, theory of verse, and controversial prose under communism (Russian and Czech literature of the 1960s-70s in particular). He has written extensively about the theories and films of Sergei Eisenstein, Soviet semiotics of cinema, and the work of dissident East European filmmakers like Jiri Menzel, Vera Chytilova, Andrzej Wajda, Roman Polanski, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Yuri Ilyenko, Vasily Pichul and Maria Khmelik, Pavel Lungin, Pal Gabor, Peter Gothar, and Dusan Makavejev. He published Russian Formalist Film Theory (1981) and, together with Anna Lawton, edited the anthology Words in Revolution: Russian Futurist Manifestoes, 1912-1928 (republished 2006). His work on poetry has been concerned with the way that rhythmic and semantic structure and sound repetition shape meaning in free verse. He has also written on the prose of Mikhail Lermontov, Karel Capek, Evgenii Zamiatin, Ludvik Vaculik, Milan Kundera, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

His teaching in recent years has been primarily devoted to cinema. He teaches courses on Russian and Ukrainian film, Polish cinema, Czech New Wave cinema, and ethnicity and gender in East Central European film, as well as seminars on film theory and on individual filmmakers such as Dusan Makavejev and Emir Kusturica. He has also taught courses on American film genres and has written about the connections between these and the genres which developed during the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. At the University of Michigan, he was Director of the Program in Film and Video Studies (now the Department of Screen Arts and Cultures) from 1981 to 1988 and of the Residential College (a small liberal arts college within LSA) from 1988 to 1996. He is currently serving as chair of the Slavic Department.